Perimenopause mood symptoms are biologically driven, not psychological
Mental health changes in perimenopause are now understood as results of hormonal fluctuations, not personality flaws, stress, or unresolved trauma — a major shift in medical thinking.
Why this matters: It overturns decades of clinical bias that labeled midlife women's mood complaints as psychosomatic or neurotic, reframing them as treatable endocrine disruptions.
Historically, medical education taught that women 'somatize' emotions, complain more, and that midlife unhappiness was a psychological inevitability. Symptoms were chalked up to personality flaws or stress. Haver notes she was trained in this bias.
Haver describes how the medical system has long dismissed perimenopausal mood changes as character defects or excessive stress. She was taught that women 'somatize' their emotions and that midlife unhappiness was almost a psychological inevitability. It took her years to untangle this bias in herself, and she says much of medicine is still working on doing the same. Now, however, science is providing the lever to shift practice: research confirms that hormonal fluctuations during perimenopause can profoundly affect mental health.
Haver shares that she was trained in a medical system that taught this brand of bias and characteristic dismissiveness, and that it took years to untangle the bias in herself.
The emotional and psychological symptoms of perimenopause have long been chalked up to personality flaws or excessive stress or waved off based on the medical bias that women are just unhappy, unnecessarily complicated, dealing with unresolved trauma, or even unintelligent.